Mending a Broken Heart
No, this isn’t another silly love song; 3-D printing could revolutionize cardiology
EACHYEAR, more than 700,000 Americans suffer myocardial infarction, aka a heart attack. Thanks to medical advances, there are myriad ways for a doctor to get the blood properly pumping and save a person’s life. A cardiologist might give a patient medication to clear or loosen blockages. Or a doctor might insert a catheter to remove the clot, or place stents in the artery so it stays open.
These interventions have vastly improved survival rates, but they don’t heal the damage caused by a cardiac event. The heart is really just one big muscle, and trauma to any muscle does some damage, which becomes scar tissue. Scar tissue on the heart means it functions far less optimally, which eventually leads to heart failure.
Short of a transplant, there isn’t a long-term fix for a damaged ticker. But a team of researchers say they’ve come up with a solution that could revolutionize cardiology. Using 3-D printing, Brenda Ogle, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota-twin Cities, has created a patch a doctor could apply to mend a broken heart. “We’ve used stem cell– derived cardiac muscle—cardiac myocytes—and actually mixed those with other cell types needed for blood vessels.” This prevents what would otherwise happen naturally: the formation of a different type of cells known as fibroblasts, which secrete scar tissue. Ogle’s team induced cardiac arrest in lab mice, and after placing the cell patch, saw a significant increase in functional capacity after just four weeks. These findings were published this past January in Circulation Research, a journal from the American Heart Association.
Last June, the National Institutes of Health awarded Ogle’s team over $3 million to give pigs heart attacks and fix them. This is still a long way from being used on humans, but Ogle is optimistic. “The replacement of muscle has been the holy grail for some time,” she says. “Now, we finally have the ability to take stem cells out of the body and develop the protocols to do that.”